Monster and Kaiju Movie Thoughts and Impressions

#5: Mothra Vs Godzilla

I had to look it up, but it looks like there was about a three year gap in between Mothra and this movie, but the lack of any consistency in the visual presentation except for Mothra and the egg still feels kind of surprising. Between the first two movies with Mothra it appears that she, as this movie now refers to her and the franchise continues going forward, is the one to establish that kaiju sport a natural rivalry with shady businessmen – in addition to their other natural enemies like militaries, robots/mecha, aliens, and other kaiju.

I really don't understand how anyone rates this as one of the better fight scenes in the Godzilla franchise. The monsters are rarely even in frame together and there just isn't a whole lot of motion the old version of Mothra can do, so she just kind of flaps her wings and bobs up and down for most of it. This still manages to render Godzilla pretty much defenseless though, creating this weird situation where the monster is explicitly stated to be dying and spends her last few minutes batting Godzilla around until her truly final act of shielding the egg with her body as she dies. Which just...

Confession time I suppose, if anyone was ever going to accuse me of a toxic macho attitude it would probably have to go back to when I was a kid and was really indignant that the fancy butterfly-looking creature with barely any legs was depicted as being more formidable than the spiky "fire breathing" theropod dinosaur creature. I've certainly gotten over it since then, but it's also a thing that Mothra has generally declined in comparison to Godzilla ever since. Rodan got left behind by staying stagnant as everything else got bigger and more powerful, but Mothra's been actively downgraded multiple times. That, and just general maturing have made me more sympathetic to the fictional monster over time.

It's a bit of a mixed bag for Godzilla in this movie, on the one hand it's a fair showcase for Godzilla's often crazy durability, but there's not much else to give him a lot of credit here. He actually ignores the military attacks on him, just walking around while tanks, artillery, and planes bombard him – which reminds me there's one part where some soldiers very seriously step forward with their rifles as the command staff start to leave, ready to shoot like that's going to do anything. The old suits never really made an agile Godzilla very possible, but on my big re-watch here I notice that this is the most clumsy he's been – probably more deliberate characterization in this case than the previous movies practical source. It's an amusing trait of the character that's persisted even into the ongoing Hollywood portrayal but in this movie Godzilla straight up gets his tail stuck in a tower and pulls it down on himself in what's supposed to be his rampage scene.

One curious thing about this movie is that it's where we get Mothra's phoenix-like life cycle where she dies but effectively comes back with the newly hatched caterpillar form. It also complicates that by having twins come out of the egg means it starts in an odd place. It just raises all kinds of questions – why do they attack Godzilla anyway, revenge or finishing the fight based on their assumed memories of being the last Mothra? Or did the fairies ask them to fight, they are singing at the twins the whole time, even though they declined to ask Mothra to fight Godzilla earlier only relenting when Mothra cut into the conversation? What happened to the missing one in all the other movies? (Ok, Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster answers some of this, but it's what came to mind while watching) It's also a little odd just how little Godzilla does to defend himself from the caterpillars but there's a likely answer to that in the next movie.

All in all I'm sort of neutral about this movie, but I'm excited to get to the next one as that was always a favorite of mine.